Healey joining up again with Daley at Tur

E. Jason Wambsgans, Chicago Tribune

Lori Healey, the onetime chief of staff to former Mayor Richard Daley and who served as the host committee director for the recent NATO summit, will reunite with Daley as CEO of his investment firm Tur.

Lori Healey, the onetime chief of staff to former Mayor Richard Daley and who served as the host committee director for the recent NATO summit, will reunite with Daley as CEO of his investment firm Tur. (E. Jason Wambsgans, Chicago Tribune)

Lori Healey, who most recently ran Chicago's NATO summit committee, is leaving real estate development firm The John Buck Co. to become chief executive of Tur Partners, former Mayor Richard M. Daley's new investment firm.

"For me, it's an opportunity to lead a private sector company as a CEO, and, obviously, I have a great deal of respect for the mayor and the vision that he had," Healey said in an interview.

Although Healey has had several "CEO-like" positions, as she put it, she has never run a company. With her hire, Daley will drop the title of managing principal and become executive chairman of Tur, Healey said. His son Patrick Daley is a principal and managing director of a related entity, Tur Partners Eurasia LLC.

Healey has long been part of Daley's inner circle. Her last stint at City Hall took her from planning commissioner to chief of staff to president of Chicago's failed Olympic bid. She joined John Buck as a principal in 2009, only to be called back to City Hall last year to organize the summit under Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration.

John Buck continued to pay her salary during that seven-month period, in effect lending her out to the NATO host committee. Despite her departure, Healey will remain on Buck's six-member board of directors.

"It took me less than a second to tell Lori to jump at (the opportunity to run Tur)," Buck said. "It is my hope that we can work together in some ways going forward because she believes, as I do, there's going to be a lot of capital raised in the private sector for (public) infrastructure projects."

Buck said that the former mayor apologized for poaching Healey when the two saw each other recently at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, "but I think (the apology) was half-hearted," Buck said with a laugh.

On Monday, Buck also said that Richard Lindsay, who had worked on the company's joint venture in Abu Dhabi,will co-lead real estate development with Rafael Carreira. Healey previously led real estate development. The firm also will close a $90 million real estate fund, its fourth, this month. That fund is smaller than the firm's two previous funds.

Buck said the company is erecting buildings at a rate of one every two to three years. (Construction is under way on a $100 million, 34-story apartment tower in Philadelphia's Center City.) But since the real estate downturn, Buck said, he has shifted the firm's focus to consulting work and buying existing office and apartment buildings in partnership with other investors.

Buck founded the firm in 1981. It has built many of Chicago's signature office towers, including the Leo Burnett Building and others on Wacker Drive, as well as the North Bridge retail complex on North Michigan Avenue, which houses Nordstrom.

Healey's new role will be far more entrepreneurial and global. Tur Partners, which Daley founded after leaving office in 2011, has about a dozen employees, Healey said. Its top leadership has extensive experience in finance and international business, particularly in Russia and China.

Its advisory business "goes both outbound and inbound," Healey said. "For example, (Tur) is helping companies domestically who want to do business in (Russia and China). And it's helping clients in those markets identify opportunities here. That's what the company has started out as, but we're looking at new and different markets."

On the investment side, Healey declined to say whether Tur has purchased stakes in any companies or whether it has raised capital from outside investors and, if so, how much and from where. All she would reveal is that Tur's interests are broad.

"There's been a focus on big firms, international firms, manufacturing-based and service-based," she said. "There's a big interest in clean technology, but I don't think you can say anything definitively. We live in an opportunistic world."